The Freesound Blog

Hello dear Freesounders!

After almost eight years of great sounds and constant growth it has become necessary to define some terms of use for Freesound. These terms are intented to outline the legal aspects of Freesound and to clarify your rights as users, our privacy policy and, in general, to protect you and us against incorrect uses of the site.

By adding these terms of use?we have not changed the philosophy of the site. It is just a necessary step to keep on growing and improving Freesound!

In order to continue using Freesound you’ll have to accept?these terms of use. But hey, don’t worry because they are not excessively long to read and we have also created a?friendly version?of the terms which makes them much easier to understand. Here is a brief summary of the terms:

• Uploaded sounds are released under one of the CC licenses you choose. Other content (metadata, tags, comments, etc…) is provided as CC-Zero.
• Your activity in Freesound is public and can be seen by all users (except your private messages).
• You are responsible for your posted content.
• We (Freesound) keep your data confidential and apply security measures to keep this confidentiality.
• We (Freesound) don?t warrant that all the data on the site is correct. We are not liable for information not posted by us on this site.
• We (Freesound) may remove accounts of users that do not comply with the terms or who do not behave correctly (spam, offensive comments…).
• We can use anonymized data collected from Freesound (statistics about sounds, tags, comments, downloads…) for research purposes.
• You agree to receive email notifications from us.

You can read the full text and the friendly version here.

Starting tomorrow (1/3/13), the first time you log in to Freesound you’ll see a screen saying that you have to accept the terms of use before continue using Freesound. That screen will contain the same explanation you’re reading here.

Thank you for your patience and understanding! We really appreciate the commitment of the Freesound community!!!

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Hi all,

It looks like the private message spammers have really started liking us lately. Almost daily I’m deleting spammers. For now the best is to “report as spam” as soon as you get a spam message: if more than a few people do this the person will be blocked from sending further messages immediately.

Other than this we are also looking into?severely?restricting the message-sending capabilities of people who have not done certain actions yet on the site. I won’t say which because this might be a hint for the spammers, but the idea is that if you haven’t done X or Y on the site you won’t be able to send more than X messages per minute/hour/day.

Sorry for the annoyance!

– Bram

A number of people have been encountering problems recently while downloading sounds on freesound. We apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. We have tracked the issue down to a misconfigured router in the freesound network. This fault has been resolved and downloads should return to normal. Once again, sorry to those who this error has affected.

Hello all,

It’s not always easy to describe your sound files, we know. Hoever, we did want to let you know that even we at freesound are impressed at this example of a perfect description. The uploader describes the recording gear, the environment, why he uploaded the file, etc etc. Thanks a lot Philip Goddard!

If everyone would use 1/10th the description power Mr. Goddard seems to wield freesound would be an even better place.

– Bram

Hello everyone,

today we have updated Freesound search functionalities with some improvements we have been working on in the last weeks. First of all, we have added a new sorting algorithm that automatically sorts the search results according to their relevance with respect to the introduced query terms. This is now the sorting option by default, but you can still sort sounds according to their number of downloads, average rating, creation date or duration.

Moreover, we also added a search option called Group sounds by pack?which basically collapses all search results belonging to sounds of the same pack in a single entry that can then be expanded with a provided link. With that option we prevent filling pages of search results with very similar sounds. Group sounds by pack is enabled by default, but you can switch it off using the advanced search options.

We have also slightly changed the behavior of Most downloaded sounds list in the sounds page. As some of you requested in the forums, we are now displaying a list of the most downloaded sounds only among those uploaded during the last week. In this way we promote more popular new sounds instead of all-time popular sounds.

We hope you enjoy these improvements!
Take them as a?Christmas?present from the Freesound Team 😉

Happy freesounding!

The Freesound team proudly announces that we have finished the migration and are finally back!

If you find any bugs or broken things please report them in the forums or using the contact form.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

– the Freesound team

Hello everyone!

the server that is currently hosting Freesound is getting older and has realised that time has arrived to leave this job for younger and faster machines. For that reason tomorrow (thursday 25th of October) we’re migrating Freesound to our brand new servers! With that hardware upgrade we’ll be able to handle more requests and make Freesound faster.

Downtime will start around 11 AM (Spanish time, GMT+1). We are planning to be back before 5 PM. After the migration we will greatly appreciate if you notify us about anything you see that is not working well. Freesound has been constantly growing and has become quite a complex system with many many many little things to take into account!

That is all for the moment!
the Freesound team

Hello everyone,

some months ago we introduced a new anti-spam measure to reduce the amount of spam in the forums. This has been working quite well, but we are aware that there is still spam out there and we have been advised that spam is still being sent through private messages.

For that reason, we introduced a new feature that allows the Freesound community to collaboratively help removing spam. You’ll now be able to report sound comments, forum posts or private messages as being spam. We’ll keep track of these reports, and manually “check” these users whose comments, posts and messages have repeatedly being marked as spam.

That is all for the moment!
Keep on freesounding!

the Freesound team